For an Ex-Dentist, the Age of Exploration Treks On

CARACAS, Venezuela

CHARLES BREWER-CARÍAS has 16 plants, three reptiles, two insects and one scorpion named in his honor. He has endured a raft of tropical diseases, including deadly leishmaniasis, a spleen-enlarging ailment caused by the bite of a sand fly.

In 186 expeditions into Venezuela’s backlands, Mr. Brewer-Carías has discovered the world’s largest sinkholes, on a tabletop mountain called Sarisariñama, and practiced dentistry among the Yekuana tribe, whose language he speaks fluently. He once survived by eating roasted termite larvae, and has received the Order of the Liberator award for venturing into jungle at the center of a territorial dispute with neighboring Guyana.

Now 67 years old, and still recovering from an attack by thieves three years ago that left him with a gunshot wound to his shoulder, Mr. Brewer-Carías shows few signs of tiring. Accompanied by Czech speleologists earlier this year, he documented what may be the world’s largest quartzite cave. He is an explorer, if such a profession can still be said to exist, in the tradition of his Victorian forebears.

“I’m not a botanist, nor a herpetologist, nor a taxonomist,” Mr. Brewer-Carías said in an interview at the Caracas Country Club, a well-guarded island of luxury where, dressed casually in an aging shirt and cargo pants, he stood out amid a crowd clad in blazers and Cartier watches. “My game is to discover.”

It is challenging these days for someone with such flair to pursue that goal in Venezuela, a country thoroughly divided between President Hugo Chávez’s supporters and opponents. By blood and upbringing, Mr. Brewer-Carías is rooted among those who disdain Mr. Chávez’s effort to remake Venezuela with socialist-inspired development projects even as, paradoxically, the elite grow richer in an oil-fueled economic boom.

Mr. Brewer-Carías’s brother, Allan R. Brewer-Carías, a noted legal scholar, fled into exile last year, accused of helping draft the decree used in the coup that briefly ousted Mr. Chávez in April 2002. Because of his name and the social strata in which he circulates, Mr. Brewer-Carías said, “getting a job in this country has become impossible for me.”

IT has been many years since Mr. Brewer-Carías has had what many people would consider a normal job. Trained as a dentist, he practiced for nearly 20 years before devoting himself full time to exploration, writing six books about his adventures illustrated with his own brilliantly composed photographs. The New York Botanical Garden made him an honorary research associate, thanks to his studies of the use of plants among the Yanomami.

Unusual for an explorer, Mr. Brewer-Carías has rarely ventured outside his home territory, finding all the adventure he needs in Venezuela’s rugged back country. There are places with more biodiversity, like neighboring Colombia, and places he said were potentially fascinating, like the Gobi Desert of northern China or uninhabitable reaches of Antarctica. But Venezuela has the advantage, he said, of “geologic greatness” unmatched by any other country.

“The sandstone mountains in our jungle are the majestic leftovers of an enormous washover of sand that came from Africa,” he said.

These tepuis (pronounced teh-POO-ees), as the tabletop mountains are known, have attracted explorers since the days of Sir Walter Raleigh. Accounts of their sheer vertical rise and isolation helped inspire Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who set his adventure novel “The Lost World” amid the tepuis.

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At times referred to as the Galápagos Islands of mainland South America for their unique variety of flora and fauna, the tepuis are also the setting for the world’s tallest waterfall, the 3,212-foot Angel Falls.

The sandstone formations continue to hold sway over Mr. Brewer-Carías, who still undertakes physically arduous expeditions into the interior with the assistance of private sponsors. Taut and sunburned, he keeps in shape with a daily regimen of running and weight-lifting, challenging a visitor half his age to see who could do more chin-ups.

“The tepuis are a window into what once was Gondwanaland,” he said, referring to the supercontinent that hundreds of millions of years ago grouped together the land masses of the Southern Hemisphere.

MR. BREWER-CARÍAS became a magnet for controversy over his work with the American anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, dragged into a bitter dispute over whether Indians were mistreated under their watch, as claimed in Patrick Tierney’s book “Darkness in El Dorado,” published in 2000.

“The world of academic exploration is petty, bitter and stingy,” Mr. Brewer-Carías said. “As my struggle to wipe the stigma from my name shows, it is not for me.”

Roy McDiarmid, a senior herpetologist with the United States Geological Survey in Washington, said that when he first met Mr. Brewer-Carías 30 years ago, “I wondered if such a person could actually exist.”

But after accompanying Mr. Brewer-Carías on several expeditions, including one lasting nearly two years in the Cerro de Neblina area of southern Venezuela, Mr. McDiarmid said: “I can’t frankly imagine the accusations against him to be true. Given my knowledge of Charles, he is a remarkable natural historian who has the utmost respect and fascination for Amerindian peoples.”

It is perhaps not surprising that controversy swirls around Mr. Brewer-Carías, given his frank, unreconstructed view of the world. Born into an aristocratic family in 1938, when Caracas had just 300,000 residents and was surrounded by coffee and sugarcane plantations, he has witnessed the city’s population mushroom to around four million.

His English grandfather, Mathias Brewer, came to Venezuela by way of St. Thomas, then a Danish possession, and served for decades as Britain’s vice consul in La Guaira, a port near Caracas. His mother’s family descends from a Spanish general dispatched by Madrid in the early 19th century in an effort to reassert control over Simón Bolívar’s rebels.

“We were counterrevolutionaries, of course,” said Mr. Brewer-Carías, who speaks English with a slight Spanish accent. “I am for an oligarchy, an oligarchy of the well prepared.”

Such talk, while the norm behind the closed doors of some mansions here, is not often heard publicly in a country trying, at least rhetorically, to do away with a rigid class structure. Mr. Brewer-Carías, the father of five children, has spoken with greatest alarm about Venezuela’s endemic violent crime since the 2003 break-in at his home in the hills above Caracas, when he killed one of three intruders with an old shotgun and survived a bullet that pierced a shoulder blade.

For inspiration, Mr. Brewer-Carías continues to pore over accounts of Venezuela by travelers who preceded him. He can, and did, recite Raleigh’s description, in Elizabethan English, of a tepui he is believed to have seen on a 1596 trip up the Orinoco River:

“There falleth ouer it a mightie riuer wich toucheth no parte of the side of the mountaine but rusheth ouer the toppe of it, and falleth to the grounde with terrible noyse and clamor, as if 1,000 great belles were knockt one against the other.”